


the way the sun looks on you

by molotovhappyhour



Series: The Force Shall Free Me [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, M/M, jedi/padawan relationship implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-03 11:46:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1743581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/molotovhappyhour/pseuds/molotovhappyhour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sun plays tricks with Eren's eyes and Levi catches himself staring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i'm so sorry that i can't manage to post this stuff in order
> 
> all u really need to know is that when a Jedi's eyes go yellow it's a Bad Thing

“I _like_ it here.” Eren holds his arms away from his body, bedecked in armour that’s not quite green enough to be the colour of his eyes. Cold bites at the skin of his face, pulling up red from beneath his cheeks, his breath coming out on clouds of white. “We should do missions here more often. Is this where you learned how to shoot?”

Levi snorts, tucking his hands under his armpits, folding his arms across his chest and watching as Eren takes a few practice swings, testing the weight of metal and how it differs from the free motion afforded by his Jedi clothes. “No,” Levi tells him. “I learned everything I knew on Tatooine or I learned it on the job. Mandalore was for backwoods _hicks_.”

A couple of the mercenaries in the camp stop and look toward him. One has her helmet on, obscuring their face, but the other has good humour tucked at the corners of her mouth and dancing in her eyes, and he isn’t too worried.

The life of Mandalore is spread out like freckles in the northern hemisphere this time of year, where a lot of the creatures have gone to ground to hide from the cold. But it’s still pure and tangled in a web of something, and it’s nice to be out of Coruscant for a week or two. The city can be draining—the constant noise at the back of his brain an endless source of headaches.

The only problem is his hands are just this side of too cold to hold needles properly.

But at least the little shit is enjoying himself.

Eren turns away from him for half a moment, his presence in the Force shifting only slightly. (It moves with him—like liquid—in a way that others' don’t. There’s a stillness one can find in anyone, if they look hard enough, but Eren’s like a river, or a rainstorm, or something else entirely. It’s impossible to keep track of, unless one knows what they’re looking for.

Levi always knows.)

“Do I get to keep this armour after we’re done?” Levi’s words had stopped coming out on white puffs some time ago, when his tongue had frozen inside his mouth. Eren’s releasing steam like a fucking hydraulic engine going at full tilt.

“Depends on how much we like you,” says the small merc in deep red armour.

“ _We_ might even keep _you_ ,” says another, in gold. (The colour of _vengeance_. And it’s not that hard to see why Eren likes these people so much.)

“He’s not housebroken,” Levi says, by way of refusal. As if he’d ever leave the fucker _he’d_ trained on this backwater world, filled with rabid wildlife and tiny cities, mercenaries and bounty hunters. He knows exactly what he left when he became a Jedi—doesn’t really see how it would be any sort of different here.

(Eren would be a shitty bounty hunter anyway, with wide eyes and too much determination, and a black-and-white morality that would make any sane person _blanche_.)

Eren makes a face, pulling the storm system with him. His bootsteps are almost as silent as when he’s in his robes as he closes the space between them, though the helmet clipped to the armour’s belt rattles more than his lightsaber does.

Something glassy flickers on Eren’s face and he brings his head down.

The liquid cloud of brightness—toxic or liberating, Levi’s been struggling to tell—tells him nothing, and for a second Levi wonders if Eren’s about to kiss him or slam their foreheads together, cracking open their skulls like eggs.

Instead, he taps their foreheads together—still a butting of heads, but nothing quite so violent. The sensation that is _Eren_ crawls up his spine, warm and anything but delicate, the way he always feels and probably always will. “The Mandalorians,” Eren says, by way of explanation when he rights himself, “said that a lot of outsiders used to spread rumours that that was how they greeted each other, but smacking foreheads like morons.” His grin is wide and white and he looks for all the world like a Padawan again, spouting facts for someone else’s benefit. “But they also said that that’s a kiss—when you have helmets on or something. A warrior’s kiss.”

He says it quietly like the secret that it is, and Levi shoves at him with the Force, keeping his hands crossed over his chest.

(He isn’t embarrassed, and even if he was he wouldn’t say so.

Eren probably knows anyway.)

Levi says nothing and watches Eren go back to the mercenary camp, asking enthusiastic questions about what it is, exactly, this infiltration entails. There’s nothing really _huge_ on Mandalore, he says. So what’s the point?

When he turns his head to look at the one in gold, Eren’s eyes catch fire—and they go from green to yellow, a trick of the winter sun.

(Something sick and oily rises up in Levi’s gut, and he isn’t quite sure what it is.

He reaches for Eren in the Force—like he always does when he’s worried—and it’s like pulling his fingers through fog, through a rainstorm, through molten rock, through nothing all at once.

No, Levi never could quite pin him down.

But it’s never made him quite so nervous, before.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is it that you're reaching for?

( _what are you reaching for?_ )

The stars don’t exist on Coruscant.

Light, instead, comes from the orbital mirrors in the daytime. And the night is ruled by neon, by the lights of ever-moving speeders, by viewports that glow yellow with the warm sentiment of home. The city-planet never sleeps, and so it stands to reason that it doesn’t need a nightlight to keep the monsters away.

Though—though the undercity sees Coruscant a little differently.

It isn’t just that the stars don’t _exist_ —it’s that they are mythology. They’re a story people tell one another when they overhear spacers in cantinas. They’re a fairytale for the children of the gutter to have something to dream about while hawkbats screech between the spacescrapers that block the skies they’ve never seen, except reflected from transparisteel windows down to the slime of the sublevels.

They’re a comfort—but they’re also a lie.

At least that was what Eren had always heard.

“Master,” Eren murmurs into the quiet and his words are given a burning sort of life on a white cloud of cold as they stand outside together. He hasn’t been a Padawan in months—but his old habits aren’t dying like they’re supposed to, and this one is especially hard to kill. “Master Levi.”

Levi’s eyes glitter like flint as they cut over to Eren’s face, and his arms relax from where they’re crossed over his chest. He looks so _different_ when they’re not in their robes, and now that they’re alone—now that the Mandalorian mercenaries are asleep—it’s hard not to notice. It’s always been hard not to notice him.

“What?” Levi’s breath doesn’t coalesce like Eren’s does. He’s like a ghost that way. “Are you about to ask if you can live here with some mercenary thugs? Because from experience, there isn’t shit for dick in the business out here. Hutt employment is more lucrative.” But a smile touches his mouth and there’s a raw sort of red to his cheeks from the winter here, bright even in the dying fire light, and Eren doesn’t have to worry about whether he’s alive or not.

(He reaches into the Force, just to make sure—and he exhales against the white-hot center around which he’s been revolving for more years than he thinks he’d like to count.

 _what are you reaching for, eren jaeger?_ )

Eren snorts and it hurts the inside of his nose. “ _No_ ,” though the thought does give him pause as he pulls his eyes away from Levi’s face to look at the glittering diamond-dust of starlight above them both. Before he’d been pulled into the world of the Jedi, he’d never seen so many. He’d never thought there would _be_ so many. And he can’t see very much of them, _any_ of them, back on Coruscant. “No, I was just wondering if you knew what the sky looked like back at the Temple? If all the lights have ever gone out on Coruscant before.”

He can feel Levi’s eyes on him, like needles picking at his pores, and there’s a gentle brush of not-fingers against his face when the Force pushes over his shoulders like the beginnings of a drizzling rain.

“No,” Levi says after a moment and Eren’s eyes drop back to the half-frozen earth beneath his boots (not his boots—Mandalorian boots. He’s not a Jedi here). “No, I’ve never seen the starchart of Coruscant in person. Why? Curious about your horoscope?”

He sighs—and steam stretches out into the semi-darkness of the mercenary camp before rising toward the skyline and the stars. The white-silver is bright enough to see by, which—as a child—he’d never really expected. How could anything be brighter than the screaming lights on a planet so full of life it was almost deafening to live there—almost _blinding_ to be a part of?

“No. Just curious in general.” He licks his lips, and they’re chapped beneath his tongue. “Do you _know_ my horoscope?”

Levi’s laugh is sharp and surprising, though it dissolves into something quieter, something lower that starts a slow churn in Eren’s stomach. “No, I don’t. But I can tell you what the Force says about you.” Levi gets a little closer, and when he does Eren sees something a little disconcerting sitting on his face.

(There’s something worrying him—there’s an almost-invisible pulse inside the center of Eren’s galaxy. It makes his teeth ache when he tries to grab for it and listen to it better.)

“What does the Force say about me?” He leans down when Levi tilts his head, and there’s a quiet laugh shared between them that the Force replicates by rippling outward—like a pond into which a rock was dropped.

“It says you’re a troublesome little fuckhead who causes me nothing but grief.” Levi murmurs this close to where the cloud of Eren’s breathing would mingle with his own, if he’d had one. “But who’ll do fine tomorrow when we dick around with the mining base.”

He could bring their foreheads together again—in the way that wouldn’t tell anyone anything, in the way that just looks like two idiot mercenaries sharing a secret between their skulls. But there’s no one out here—no one for _kilometers_ , since their company is asleep. It’s not like Coruscant where there’s someone everywhere, where there’s no space to just sit and think in quiet. And so he doesn’t. He leaves Levi’s forehead well enough alone.

Instead, he leans closer to Levi’s mouth. “That can’t be all the Force says about me,” he whispers. His words condense on Levi’s eyelashes.

“I think I’m getting something else.” Levi’s words aren’t given presence on a cloud, but they do trace themselves on Eren’s lips. “But we’re being a little too loud, I can’t hear it right.”

“Pretty sure I can fix that.”

“Are you sure? You always have _something_ to say—“

This is a kiss. Not the kiss of warriors. Certainly not the kiss of Jedi. It is the kiss of two mercenaries, beneath starlight and space on the outer edge of a galaxy full to bursting with the magic that comes out of so many living things in the same place. It is a kiss at the branching of a river.

And this kiss bleeds into the Force—the bright whiteness wraps around the nuclear furnace.

( _what are you reaching for?_ )

There is a breath of steam.

Angles change and there is a sigh and the grasping of gloved hands. Colour rises higher into cheeks, deepens and darkens.

This—out here, in the not-darkness, in the world lit by stars—is not the same as the sublevels, as the undercity of the concrete-planet, of the slums where a child and his friends had dreamt of dragging their fingers through stardust, through the beginning of future planets being born by the collapse of too-big stars.

“Hey,” Levi says, and when he speaks his words are exhaled on a cloud of white, “look at me.”

Eren blinks and their noses brush. Both of them are cold and Levi’s eyes lock onto his own. “Getting something else?”

The anxiety from before—the pulse that rattles at the roots of Eren’s teeth—returns and dies and returns again. Levi half-smiles and his gloved knuckles tap at Eren’s cheek, but the pulse gets a little louder. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m getting that your lips are fucking chapped and you better fix that before you kiss me again.”

The way his voice drops when he says _kiss_ brings Eren back away from the fifteen different directions that his mind is always running in. It may not have felt like it, but it was the kiss of Jedi. A secret one. A prohibited one. One that wasn’t allowed.

“Okay,” Eren says, and feels Levi’s nerves yank at the lining of his stomach. This—and he should have known, should have _guessed_ that this was it—is what the pulsing is. This is a forbidden thing.

He pulls his limbs back in, pulls himself closer, in the Force, shrinks himself down to a manageable size, though the taste of powdered sulfur sits heavily on the back of his tongue. Or maybe that's the taste of ozone. He doesn't know which would be worse, sitting behind his teeth like dirt. Either way, it makes it hard to swallow when he looks back up at the stars.

Eren licks his lips. It tastes cosmic. Important. A balance tips, somewhere.

The pulse beside him dims and Eren reaches again, this time tentatively, this time with the worry that perhaps this was a line they shouldn’t have crossed. It’s one thing to bring their faces close. It is another entirely to push his tongue into Levi’s mouth.

He brushes against Levi in the Force and there is almost no reaction time between that and when Levi pushes back, threads around him and holds on.

(Levi’s always there when Eren reaches for him.

He doesn’t think he’d know what to do if he wasn’t.)


End file.
